Hey everyone. And welcome to today's video,
where we're going to be looking at mandala patterns and in particular,
how to create them using a free mandala generator tool that I've created for
you,
which is going to allow you to create an unlimited number of Mandala patterns
fast.
And you can use these for things like creating the interiors of KDP coloring
books,
which as we can see here on Amazon are very popular and as evidenced by the low
best sellers rank sell extremely well. You can also add a bit of color to these,
to use on the covers of books that you publish on Amazon.
And I'm also going to show you how to use these patterns on shapes like animals,
plants, flowers, birds, whatever you like. Again,
to create original images that you can use inside your KDP coloring
books.
So if you are interested in publishing books on Amazon in particular coloring
books, then follow along as I walk you through the whole process.
So first things first,
we're going to be using Affinity Designer because we need to do this in vector
editing software. Now I know the software isn't free.
I think it currently runs at around 59 US dollars,
but they do offer a free trial.
So you could try that out and use this tool that I'm going to show you.
Unfortunately, that means we can't do this in Canva. However,
the images that you do create in Affinity Designer,
you can import into Canva to build up the interior of your book.
So this mandala generator tool, well it's in my Gumroad shop,
which I'll leave a link to down below. So you need to go across there.
And as I said, it's absolutely free.
And you just download the file to your computer.
Now it's a .afdesign file.
And all you need to do is just drag this across into Affinity
Designer. And you'll see, it will open up this blank page,
which is an 8.5 by 11 inch page,
which means this is designed for creating 8.5 by 11 inch
interiors. Now over on the right hand side,
you can see we've got these two layers here,
the mandala layer and the margin template layer. Now,
if we put a tick in this box here,
we can switch on this margin template and it will show us this pink border.
And this is the margins for our page.
Now issues with margins do cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. So,
when creating these patterns,
as long as you keep your pattern within this pink border,
you'll have no issues when you upload your interior to Amazon and preview it.
And when you then eventually publish it.
You will hopefully not get your book rejected.
And you can turn this layer off and on.
So initially you can turn it on as we create our pattern.
Now the important layer is the one above it called the mandala layer.
Now you'll need to follow the exact steps that I'm going to show you.
On the left hand side, we've got this little triangle,
so you need to click on that.. Then move down.
And we've got this layer called top group again,
click on the little triangle to open up that layer.
And then of the two layers that just opened click on the bottom layer.
And again,
click on the small triangle and it will give us this layer here called click
here. And you can ignore this little box that appears here.
This will soon disappear next over on the left hand side,
we need to go to our vector brush tool.
And at the top here we can see we've got a few options.
One we can choose the color of our brush.
You can also choose a color on the right hand side here.
I often use the HSL sliders because I find these very quick to be able
to change all the different colors.
But we're just going to be doing this in black.
Then we've got the width of our brush. So we can move the slider up and down.
Initially,
I'm just going to show you with a 10 pixel width brush and we've got opacity
which can leave at 100%. Now, this is very simple.
All you need to do is start on the page. Now,
often I recommend if you're just starting out doing this,
start somewhere near the middle of the page,
and all you need to do is just hold down the left mouse button and start to
draw. And you can see straight away, we develop these patterns.
And you can move your mouse and click and create all sorts of interesting
patterns. Now, I say try and keep it within that pink margin.
And you can draw, create numerous different shapes of patterns,
like so. Draw thick black lines and create lines within lines.
And here you can see straight away and very fast we've got a basic mandala
pattern. Now in order to start again,
if we go over to the right hand side layers panel,
we'll see we've got these layers labeled curve,
which is the lines that we've just drawn. So if you want to delete these,
what I suggest doing is just clicking on the first curve layer,
holding down shift and clicking on the last curve layer and just dragging that
into the bin. And you'll see our pattern will disappear. Again,
I'm going to draw another pattern
just to show you how quick this is.
And that's probably took me all of about 15 to 20 seconds to create.
Next thing you need to do is download this pattern so that you can then use
it in your interior.
So what you would do where it says margin template in the layers panel,
just switch off that layer.
Otherwise you'll end up creating a page with that pink border,
which is not what you want to do. Once you've done that, go to file,
click on export, click on PNG,
then just click on export and I'm going to call this Mandela three.
So that's downloaded the .PNG file to my computer.
So now in order to create the interior,
you would need to take that file into the software in which you're going to
create the interior. Now I do a lot of mine in Keynote.
I've done previous interiors in PowerPoint and also Canva.
And you can use software like Adobe
and Indesign and also Affinity Publisher.
I'm just going to quickly show you in Keynote.
I've set up this 8.5 by 11 inch page.
So I'm just going to copy that and just paste to create a few pages,
click on the first page again.
And it's simply just a case of dragging the image that you've created,
that .PNG image and just dropping it onto the first page of your book or
whatever page number you are at. And there you go.
You've got a simple mandala image.
Now I just want to show you something else on Affinity Designer.
So I'm going to get rid of this image. Like I said,
click on the first curve layer, go down to the last curve layer, hold down,
shift, click on that, which will highlight all the lines that we've drawn.
Drag that into the bin.
Now you may want to create a more bold or more simple mandala pattern.
And the way to do this is to go to the width slider,
the top left here and increase the width of your brush.
I'm going to choose 30 pixels. So again,
just start on the page and just start to move your mouse,
holding down the left mouse key. And again,
just draw nice bold strokes.
Now I haven't switched on my margin template,
which I'll do to make sure that I'm within these borders.
And you can add other lines as you see fit. And also what you can do,
with a thicker stroke,
is add dots and also thicker lines
like that. And again,
you've now got a very simple and fast mandala
pattern that we've just created. So again, in order to download this,
switch off the margin template, go to file, export,
PNG, export, and we'll call this mandala 4.
Download to the computer, go back to Keynote or Canva again,
wherever you're create in your interior and click on the second blank page and
just drag the file you've created into place. And you can see on the left here,
we're already building the pages of our mandala patterns.
Now I'm going to show you another thing that's very interesting,
which I mentioned earlier, and that's using these patterns within shapes.
So in order to do this,
we first need to get a shape and we're going to use the shape of an elephant.
Now I get most of my images for this type of thing from Creative Fabrica
there are other sites available, design bundles.net,
Vecteezy but I find Creative Fabrica a great source of these types of images
and they are currently still running their $1 deal,
which gives you unlimited access for the first month for $1.
There's also fonts available here and interiors for KDP
books. So all I did was do a search for elephant silhouette.
So go ahead and download that to your computer and it will open up a file like
this. Now here's one important thing before we do download the file.
When you are looking at images,
you want the vector format and these come in .svg
.ai and .eps format.
And you'll see in the description what formats the files come in and we can see
here, we've got these in EPS and SVG format.
So we're all good to go.
So you'll see here now downloaded that file and we've got all these options
available.
So I'm going to use the .SVG and I'm going to use this elephant image here.
So it's just a case of dragging that into Affinity Designer.
And here is our image. Now,
all we need to do is hit command C or control C. if you're on a windows,
computer to copy.
And next we need our mandala image that we're going to work with.
So I'm going to take one of those .PNG images that we created earlier.
And I'm just going to drag that into Affinity Designer and it will open up that
image. So we've copied the image of our elephant.
Now we need to paste it on top of our mandala image.
So we just hit command V or control V. And there we have our elephant.
And holding down shift. we can enlarge the image and move it around,
move it into position as we so wish.
Now I normally like the center of the mandala image around the center
of the shape on which we're going to superimpose our mandala.
So I think something like that will look good.
Over in the layers panel on the right you can see we've got our background
layer, which is our mandala layer and we've got this one here called path four,
which is our elephant layer.
What you need to do is drag that to below the background layer,
then right click on that layer and duplicate it.
Then with the top elephant layer, not the bottom one,
but the top elephant layer just hold the left key of the
mouse down and drag it into the mandala layer and drag it over
the image of the mandala that you can see here in the layers panel.
And you'll notice that little blue vertical box will appear and then just let
go of your mouse. And you can see over here,
we've got our elephant with the mandala pattern superimposed on
top of it. Now, the problem is this hasn't got an outline.
So that's gonna look a bit odd on the page of a coloring book.
So now we need to create the outline of our elephant.
So over in the layers panel, click on the bottom path4 layer,
which has got our elephant in.
Go to the stroke button at the top here,
we've got the fill button and we've got the stroke button,
which has currently got a red line through it,
which means this image doesn't have a stroke. It's invisible.
So we need to give this image a black stroke. Now, again,
I'm on the HSL sliders. So all we need to do is move that slider.
Now we can make that stroke, white, gray, or completely black,
which is what we want. Then click on the stroke tab.
Now we need to increase the width of our stroke.
So we'll just move that and you'll see the outline of our elephant will increase
and you can move this up and down and create a thick or thin
outline.
And normally what I do is create an outline that surround the same thickness as
the lines on the mandala pattern. And there we have our elephant outlined.
Now what I suggest doing next over in the layers panel,
clicking on our mandala elephant pattern, holding down shift,
clicking on our lower elephant panel or layer,
right clicking and clicking on group.
And it will group all those layers together.
So what this means is that now holding down command and the left click of the
mouse, we can now enlarge our elephant or make it smaller. And again,
we could add more images to this page if we wanted to create a sort of a quite
detailed page to publish on Amazon.
So I'm just going to increase that a little bit.
Now you can see here that the background is checkered,
which means it's invisible. So we're going to add a white background.
Over on the left hand side, click on the rectangle tool.
Then the top left hand corner of our page,
just hold down the left click of the mouse and just drag. Now you'll see,
as I'm doing that, that this rectangle has a black border,
which we're going to get rid of. That's a stroke.
So over on the right hand side, click on the color tab.
You can see that our stroke is black.
So click on that button that puts a red line through it,
which means our stroke is now invisible.
And we want to change our page color to white.
So click on the fill button and move the slider over to the right.
And then in the layer panel,
hold down the left mouse button and just drag to below our elephant layer.
And there you can see we've now got our image of an elephant with a mandala
pattern in it on a white background. And again,
like before to export this click on file, click on export
PNG export, or call this elephant mandala. Download
to the computer, go to wherever you are, creating your interior.
I'm going to select page three and just drag my image across.
And you can see we've got a page of art mandala elephant.
Now just this image on its own might be a bit simple for a coloring book.
Depends on the age group that you are intending to focus your book on.
So you may want to add other types of animals or other elephants or maybe
a jungle background to this page just to make it a bit more interesting.
So there you have it, you would then build up the interior of your book,
which you would then save as a PDF file, ready to upload to KDP.
As I mentioned earlier,
you can also add color to your images on Affinity Designer.
So you could create something that you could then use on the covers of your
books. I hope you found that useful. Now,
if you are interested in creating KDP coloring books or other types of KDP
coloring books, I do have a playlist here,
which runs you through the steps of creating different types of coloring book
interiors. Thank you very much for your time.
It is very much appreciated and until next time, goodbye.